We go to school to learn how to add fractions and mix solutes and solvents. We learn how to spell long and complicated English words and how to speak another language of our choice. I know a lot of information about Civil Rights, the JFK assassination, and the effect of terrorism on society in the United States, but I didn't know how to help my best friend. I didn't know, because there are no classes that teach you how to tell an adult what's really going on when your friend is using drugs in a less than experimental format. Nobody told me how to talk someone down off the ledge, or what happens when you're too late.
Picture middle school, and then picture middle school with awful braces, glasses and hair you didn't know how to style yet, and a closet full of hand-me-downs with the Abercrombie and Fitch logo across the chest. Nobody told you that you had to look like a new person. Now picture walking into classes all day, surveying the desks, and not seeing any of your friends. Picture delegating yourself to the back of the class out of shyness. You're picturing my first day of middle school, and every day after that until I met the holy grail of friendships.
My life became a cheesy movie about two girls braving the world together. She lived across the road, so we spent almost every day together. The greatest thing about her was that she didn't try to change me in any way. I looked the way I looked, I acted like a dork, and she just loved me the way I was, without prejudice. Nobody had met me and just automatically treated me that way before. She was the greatest, she was so outgoing and kind, and she taught me how to crawl out of my shell and try new things just by being around me. She always made me feel included, and I know for a fact that I wouldn't be the same person I am today if we had never become friends.
So, you can see why it was hard for me to take a step back and get help when "new things" became cigarettes, alcohol, and stories about drug use and sneaking out. I didn't want her to be anything but the person I got along with so well. She couldn't possibly be this destructive, self-loathing, insecure person. She couldn't be going to school high every day. She couldn't be doing all those things, because she was the girl I met in third period in the seventh grade that once tried to eat an entire tub of cookie dough with me on an elementary school playground.
So I ignored what was happening, but I was getting more and more uncomfortable, and more and more consumed with the desperation not to lose her. I thought telling her mom would be losing her. What I didn't realize was that not telling her mom would result in losing her, too.
I decided it wasn't really happening. When she gave me my first cigarette (which I was, in no way, forced to smoke, but foolishly did anyway) I thought there was no way it was worse than that. Underage smoking, while horrible and a pretty stupid thing to do, was low on the totem pole of worst things in the world. However, after junior prom, I saw her in her basement in a bad state, there were things I couldn't name on the coffee table, and I thought there was no way it could be worse than that. She wasn't in any immediate danger, right?
But it was getting a lot worse than that, and she even told me about it in a tone of voice that was so shockingly nonchalant that I was in denial. I always thought she was exaggerating. She wasn’t like that before. If she wasn’t like that before, then how could she be like that now?
Not long after talking to her, my friend ran away from home. We were supposed to hang out, and, when she didn’t answer her phone, I didn’t do anything. I went back to sleep and woke up even more exhausted. She kept telling me she wanted to disappear, I didn’t think she would, and then she did.
They found her with some bad people, and I haven't talked to her since we made plans. I know she's getting help across the country without me, but it took a lot longer to get to this place than it should have. She was falling apart, and I was trying to pretend it wasn't happening. There isn’t a day I don’t think about her, how she’s doing, and how she’s changed me. I wish it was possible to go back to the first time we hung out. There were no boys or any booze; just bowling balls and pizza and everything was funny and nothing hurt.
For my own selfish reasons, I wish I could still see her and go through life with her. But sometimes there has to be a new direction in your life to really make a change, and I understand that this is hers. It doesn't have to get as far as it did for you or anyone you know�. Don't let your best friend fall into the gutter. Turn to someone you trust, because the weight of your friend's safety should not have to sit on your shoulders alone.
